The Eight-legged Tenant
Taking back my student apartment from the roommate from hell
At the age of twenty-one, I’m taking my first steps into adulthood and finally living independently. I’ve moved into an apartment shared with a fellow university student who is never there. However, this morning I find that my new home has another tenant I didn’t know about.
I enter the kitchen to prepare my breakfast cereal, and I immediately spot it. Smack in the middle of the fridge door. It’s the biggest, scariest-looking spider I’ve ever seen.
It’s about the size of my hand, more torso than legs. It’s a deep dark brown. I can tell it’s a common house spider, harmless to humans, though to get that fat, it probably ate its siblings and every other critter that crossed its path.
My heart is pounding, but my stomach is also growling. I slowly walk to the fridge, grab the door handle with my thumb and index finger, and open the door as fast as I can. I get the milk and wait for my heart to slow down. Then, I take a deep breath and close the fridge.
The spider has disappeared.
I look at the floor, the ceiling — nothing.
The landlady will come over later this week to clean the kitchen. If that thing is still around, she’ll take care of it. The woman endured food shortages in World War II, so she won’t hesitate to smash the creature with her broom.
When I was three, my parents got me the most disturbing gift in the history of childhoods: a wind-up spider toy. It had two thin legs sticking out of its hairy black body. When you wound up the knob, it jumped erratically around the floor, buzzing like an angry bee. I begged my parents to throw it away, but they kept it with my other toys. They would activate it whenever we had guests over, getting a kick out of my panic-stricken reaction to the tiny toy. I had nightmares with that plastic creepy-crawly for years.
Since then, I’ve had crippling arachnophobia. Beady eyes. Fangs. Segmented legs moving in unpredictable patterns. Hanging from the ceiling as if gravity didn’t affect them. Everything about spiders says, Danger! Unnatural! Get the hell out of here!
I also feel bad for the poor little creatures. It’s not their fault they’re so ugly and terrifying. In Portugal, where I live, there are no deadly arachnids. I’ve never heard of anyone being bitten by one. They even help around the house by eating those pesky flies and mosquitos I keep complaining about. I should feel grateful. Instead, my gut demands I eradicate them from the Earth.
The following days, before entering any room in the apartment, I check around for the lurking monster — especially the top corners, where I know those of its kind like to hide. Two weeks pass, no sign of the invader. I think maybe it was all a fruit of my paranoid imagination.
Then one night, as I’m reading in bed, I sense movement in my peripheral vision. I look up at the wall opposite me and see something peeking out from the groove between the wall and the ceiling. It looks like thin black legs.
No, it can’t be.
The legs are completely still, so I get up for closer inspection. I can’t see very clearly. If it’s the creature, its torso is hidden in the groove. On the other hand, it could also be a weird-looking stain I haven’t noticed before.
As a test, I turn off the light, wait in the darkness for a few minutes, then turn the light back on.
Fuck. The legs have moved.
I search along the groove on top of the wall, which goes all around my bedroom. Finally, I find the legs, motionless, on the wall next to my bed. The rest of the body is still hidden by the groove, but I now know in my gut that it’s the creature I’ve been dreading.
OK, let’s be rational here. This thing has probably been in your room for a while, going about its business. You’ve only noticed now. So just pretend you haven’t seen the gruesome animal. If you don’t think about it, you’ll be fine.
I turn off the light, pull the sheets over my head, and close my eyes. I try to focus on sheep and homework. However, the more I try not to think about the beast, the more I do. I end up spending the entire night imagining it crawling over my face, going inside my mouth.
Morning comes, and I jump out of bed. I scan the ceiling.
“AAAAH!”
The creature is on the corner right above the head of the bed. It’s hanging from its spider web, showing its big, full, glorious belly.
Yesterday night I thought I could live with this arachnid as my roommate. But no. Who am I kidding? Its lair is right above my face while I sleep. I need to get rid of the beast.
For a second, I think of calling the landlady. However, I’m embarrassed to admit I’m afraid of spiders. I’m twenty-one. I should do the adult thing: take care of the problem on my own. Face my fear of this harmless being — even if it looks like the face of evil.
I think of the tools I can use to get the deed done. I don’t want to kill the threat, simply take it outside, but there’s no way in a million years I’m touching that disgusting exoskeleton. I get a can of RAID insecticide for flies and ants — to wake the eight-legged monster from its sleep. Then a cardboard moving box — for it to fall into, after the surprise RAID attack, and then safely taken outside.
I stand on my bed, put the box under the creature, and point the spray can at its body. Then, with my heart racing faster than ever before, I press the nozzle and watch as the jet of insecticide hits my target. Instead of falling, the beast retrieves back into the groove. Then, it sprints to the other corner of the room.
I panic and start spraying as fast as my finger can go. My enemy retreats into the corner of the wall. Finally, after several minutes of continuous spraying, I stop. The spider has curled up its legs into a ball, looking quite dead.
Oww… Sorry, my dear. I didn’t mean to kill you.
I pause for a moment of silence, paying my respects to the lost soul. Then, I go get a spoon from the kitchen to scoop out the corpse into the box. When I come back, though, the creature is on the run again, speeding along the groove as fast as its creepy paws can go.
You bastard. You were only pretending to be dead so I’d leave you alone.
The escapee is about to crawl behind my closet, where I won’t be able to reach it anymore. So I climb on my office chair, put the box in position again, and spray the little devil as close to its face as I can. I feel like I’m exorcising a demon.
DIE! DIE! DIE!
I hear a loud thump — it fell into the box.
I dash to the building entrance, keeping the makeshift spider container as far from my face as I can. I can see the fugitive racing to the edge of the box. I open the door, swiftly place the cardboard box by the tree standing two meters from the entrance, and walk away.
I go back inside the building and watch from the doorway, ready to close the door at the faintest sign of danger. Now, from a distance, I start to feel empathy for this fellow life-form again.
A tree is a good place for a spider to live. It’ll be happy there.
I don’t see my former roommate leaving the box. After a few minutes, I go check — the box is empty.
Job well done. I faced my fears and spared the life of another living being.
This incident didn’t cure my arachnophobia. However, in the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.” That day, I rose above my irrational dread and took back the apartment from the eight-legged intruder.
I could finally call myself an adult.
